An extremist, not a fanatic

March 29, 2009

The Orwell prize: worthless trash

Justin is troubled by the possibility that Iain Dale might win the Orwell prize for blogging. He shouldn’t be. The prize is worthless.The judges have invited bloggers to nominate 10 of their best posts; I had better things to do, such as pick my nose. This is a moronic way of assessing them. Over a 12 month period any serious blogger will make over 200 posts. 10 is less than 5% of their output. The only people who think you can judge something on the basis of a small and biased sample are statistically illiterate idiots.And not just idiots, but lazy ones. Anyone who really wants to know the best blogs (if this phrase has any meaning at all) will already have their favourites. The only people who need to ask others to nominate blogs, and then a handful of their posts, are those who just haven’t bothered to discover the blogosphere, and don’t want the trouble of following whole blogs.So who are these imbeciles doing the judging? They seem to be precisely the sort of superannuated old ponces that blogging is a reaction against. Their belief that anyone of merit gives a damn about their opinion can only be a triumph of ego over evidence.So, far from fearing that some semi-literate gossipmonger will win the prize, we should hope he does so. The award won’t elevate Iain Dale, but merely show the prize to be the meaningless trash it is.

1) What on earth is Ferdinand Mount doing in such dubious company?
2) They are so au fait with webby things that when I magnify their font sizes so that I can read their pages, the text starts overlaying itself.